Reporters have been lining the sidewalk in front of my house (mainly with cigarette butts and candy wrappers) eager to learn my reaction to What We Found in the Sofaplacing sixth in Maryland’s 2015 Black-Eyed Susan Book Award.

Well boys, I’ll give it to you straight. While it’s not the gold medal, nor the silver, nor the bronze, nor the bauxite, nor the potash, it is, after all, the mercury, a medal which, if worn around the neck, tends to make a mess of one’s shirt, but it’s still an honor, and I’m happy to have received it. (It was wonderful just to have been on the list.)

People express surprise that there are medals beyond bronze, but of course there are. In addition to the aforementioned bauxite, potash, and mercury, there's zinc, asbestos, and cubic zirconia. Hemingway used to lie in bed with his asbestos medal on his chest and use it as an ash tray, until the day he missed and set fire to his chest hair, which Gertrude Stein found hilarious. (The chest hair; not necessarily the fact that Hemingway set fire to it.) The lead medal, for tenth place, was discontinued in 1922 when a broad-shouldered judge casually tossed one around James Joyce's neck and Joyce fell forward down three flights of stairs. This not only marked the end of the lead medal, but also of the dais upon which awards are presented being any more than two feet high. Joyce claimed the fall did him no harm, but the next thing he wrote was Finnegans Wake.